Karla Dyson (Halle Berry) is a divorced waitress with a six year-old son, Frankie. (Sage Correa) She loves her son very much and dotes on him whenever she sees him. Karla and her husband are fighting over custody for Frankie, so Karla has a special day at the park planned for Frankie, Karla is even tracking Frankie’s movements on a walkie-talkie, as they play Marco Polo. When she doesn’t hear her son’s voice, Karla panics. Soon Karla’s worst fears are realized, her son is gone, and he sees the kidnapper driving away with her son in a 1980’s Mustang. Who are the kidnappers? Why did they kidnap Frankie?
With movies like Taken becoming all the rage in Hollywood, why shouldn’t a woman haven action movie where her son is abducted, and what better actress to do the action movie than Halle Berry? The concept of a woman saving her son from abduction may be intriguing, but the execution of this idea in this movie leaves a lot to be desired. Karla admits in the movie that she has no plan, yet she somehow finds her son’s abductors and tracks them through two states, until her magic minivan, which crashes through many objects, but never stops until it runs out of gas. When the van runs out of gas, Karla somehow walks for miles, with no food or water, through a dense forest , and finds the exact destination that she needed to find. This is not humanly possible. If that isn’t bad enough, this film features the worst portrayal of backwoods whites since Deliverance. No one deserves to be stereotyped, not African Americans, not Southern whites, not anyone but Hollywood seems to have a shorthand description of everyone. . The product placement is shameful, the ending is painfully obvious, and can’t come soon enough.
Halle Berry is the lead actress in this movie, and she’s also one of the producers, so she has to take ultimate responsibility for the quality or lack thereof. As an actress she failed, all she did was have this horrified look on her face. As a producer she should have hired better writers to produce a better script, or hired better actors to help her carry the load, but the load of this crappy movie was entirely on Halle, and she has no one to blame but herself. She’s a good actress, who’s made some very bad films, and unfortunately, this is a very bad film.
The direction is something only a stunt driver would love because most of the action takes place behind the wheel of a minivan as it chases a Mustang. The non-chase scenes are dull, in fact the chase scenes are pretty redundant, and the pacing is pretty slow. Moreover, this is a long film, made longer by lack of plot development, character development, and nothing visually exciting.
Kidnap: Take an adult nap, through this entire movie.
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